CONSERVATIVE PARADOX

This presents in brief, the fundamental dilemma facing a conservative minded individual occupying space in the political swamp of today:

But we need recognize this cancer is not necessarily isolated within a given political party. It is opportunistic: in the ’60s, it infiltrated the “bourgeois” Democratic Party the cultural Marxists despised to become the New Left that today controls many of our institutions. As it did so, this long march created a counter-trend we now see bubbling up through cracks in our national foundation.

This counter-trend, make no mistake, is every bit as identitarian as anything Edward Said ever wrote, and just as toxic. Said enormously influenced Western academics. His Orientalism laid out the case for identity politics, declaring who controls particular group narratives and how, and who and what comes to count as “authentic” and thus permitted to represent a given identity group and its (collectivist) narrative. Identity politics necessarily brackets and minimizes individualism. As with much the Left does, it remains policed by a kind of mob shaming and an enforced intellectual correctness that is linguistically incoherent.

Unfortunately, this same set of core beliefs is now ascendant on a vocal part of the self-described “Right………..

…….Simply adopting the label as it suits you doesn’t make you something you aren’t, much like calling your hamburger a carrot doesn’t make you a vegetarian. It is about a set of principles that, once they’ve become too commingled with self-serving pragmatism or “realism,” devolve into a mash of weak progressivism. This is why for years I’ve fought against RINO squishes and moderates who coopt the label “conservative” during election season, always presenting themselves as something the entirety of their records rejects.

Alt-righters — like the RINOs who leech off the conservative label — want to redefine conservatism to suit their own political purposes. What they are actually promoting is white “nationalism.”